4 barriers to healthcare disruption: money, time, talent, breakage

Terms like disruption and revolution may sound violent, but they are now all but necessary if the healthcare industry is to become more accessible and provide better outcomes, according to Lisa Stump, CIO of Yale New Haven (Conn.) Health System.

During a keynote address Oct. 11 at the Becker's Hospital Review Health IT + Revenue Cycle conference in Chicago, Ms. Stump listed the many reasons disruption is necessary in healthcare.

To start, she noted, the American healthcare system is expensive, while providing care of lower quality than in other developed nations. On top of that, "Our healthcare system is not easy to access," Ms. Stump said. The system also lacks a necessary level of cultural sensitivity and, she added, "We're burning out our physicians in the process."

For the most part, the solutions to these five roadblocks can be solved with technology, she said, including robots, clinical and operational monitoring, genomics and precision medicine, and a "5G revolution."

Those technological advancements, however, carry their own set of challenges, according to Andrew Rosenberg, MD, CIO of Ann Arbor-based Michigan Medicine, who spoke alongside Ms. Stump at the keynote.

Dr. Rosenberg outlined four obstacles to healthcare disruption:• Money: "You don't have the money to implement this technology at the scale you want."• Time: "You can't prioritize the necessary efforts to disrupt healthcare; if you think that's easy to do in any industry, try doing it in healthcare."• Talent: "How are you going to retrain those great people you have working in your organizations to do all of these new things while they have to keep doing the old things?"• Breakage: "None of you want to break anything that you're working on right now. You want to disrupt, you want to innovate — what are you going to break?"

In short, Dr. Rosenberg said, "The problem that we all have right now is that we all have the 'shiny object syndrome' — we want everything. … We are overloaded by all these possibilities."